Historical Figures

Clement Greenberg (1909-1994)

Clement Greenberg was a highly influential American formalist critic, whose responses to abstract expressionism are thought to have directly influenced the development of post-painterly abstraction. According to Greenberg, the qualities that tended to characterize successful modernist artworks included abstraction and an attention to the formal qualities of the materials. He acted as an advocate for artists such as Jackson Pollock, Joan Mitchell, Sam Francis, and Helen Frankenthaler.